Monday 20 April, 2026

Nigeria's airlines didn't shut down today. They came close enough.

Today was supposed to be the day Nigerian skies went quiet.

Jet A1 fuel went from N900 per litre at the end of February to N3,300 per litre by mid-April. That is a 267 per cent increase in eight weeks. Airlines said they were flying at a loss. One carrier had already grounded its entire fleet since March 13. The Airline Operators of Nigeria wrote to fuel marketers, to the government, to the president himself. They called it what it was: unsustainable.

They set April 20 as the deadline. That's today.

Then on Friday evening, Aviation Minister Festus Keyamo wrote them a letter. He acknowledged the crisis. He appealed for patience. He announced an emergency stakeholder meeting for Wednesday, April 22. The airlines held an emergency meeting of their own that same Friday night and agreed to stand down. Temporarily. The shutdown is off. The crisis is not.

Here's what the past eight weeks actually showed you.

Jet A1 in Nigeria is not priced the way oil is priced anywhere else. It is priced the way everything in Nigeria is priced. Whoever controls the supply chain at the moment sets the number. There is no transparent formula. There is no published benchmark. There is a regulator, the Nigerian Midstream and Downstream Petroleum Regulatory Authority. When airlines said the price reached N3,300 per litre, the NMDPRA said its data showed prices running between N1,960 and N2,800 nationwide. Either the regulator doesn't know what's happening in the market it oversees, or it knows and is saying something different. Neither answer is reassuring.

When the Strait of Hormuz closed in March and global crude spiked roughly 30 per cent, the Jet A1 price in Nigeria rose 267 per cent. The AON called this increase "artificial." That word matters. It means marketers were not simply passing on a global shock. They were building on top of one.

The gap between what global crude did and what aviation fuel did in Nigeria is the story. A 30 per cent crude spike should produce something in that range on the downstream product. It does not always work that way in a Nigerian market. Supply is controlled by a small number of large marketers. There is no price cap. There is no published cost-plus formula. Airlines have no alternative supplier to turn to. If one set of marketers raises prices, every airport in the country is affected. There is no competitive pressure pulling prices back down. The market rewards the upward move and punishes those who need to fly.

This has happened before. In 2022, airlines threatened shutdowns over the forex they needed to pay for spare parts. The government met with them, made commitments, and the crisis quietened without the core problem being resolved. In 2024, aviation fuel prices spiked again in the months after the subsidy removal cascaded through downstream markets. Airlines raised fares, absorbed losses, complained, and kept flying. Each time, the industry reaches a breaking point. Each time, the government produces a meeting rather than a structural fix.

The 2022 round produced an emergency fund that was partially disbursed and forgotten. The 2024 round produced an agreement between airlines and marketers that held for months before prices moved again. It is now April 2026, and the sector is in the same position, with the same government producing a meeting date and an appeal for patience.

The April 22 meeting might produce a price formula. It might produce a commitment to cap marketer margins. It might produce a communique and a handshake. What it is unlikely to produce is the thing that would actually address the root problem. That would be a transparent, published pricing framework for aviation fuel. One enforced consistently, built so that a supply shock in the Strait of Hormuz cannot triple the cost of flying from Lagos to Abuja in a matter of weeks.

A domestic aviation sector exists in Nigeria. It mostly works. It survives an operating environment that would have collapsed the same fleet anywhere with thinner institutional tolerance for disorder. The airlines that have stayed flying through fuel spikes, forex restrictions, and age-related maintenance costs have done so because the alternative is leaving Nigerians without domestic air travel entirely.

The person this touches hardest is not the corporate traveller on an expense account. It is the Nigerian who saved for three months to fly home for a burial and checked the price on Tuesday and again on Friday and found it had moved. The one who ends up on a fourteen-hour bus ride through checkpoints because the ticket cost more than her payslip. The one whose child missed an interview in another city because the connecting flight price jumped overnight.

Airlines saved Nigeria from a shutdown today. Not the regulator. Not the government. The airlines chose to absorb more losses and wait for Wednesday.

That Wednesday meeting will tell you something important. Not whether the crisis is over. It isn't. Whether anyone in Abuja understands that the industry doing the right thing repeatedly, without the right structure to support it, is not a sustainable policy.